Saturday, September 29, 2012

Academic Failblog

by JONATHAN HSY

Greetings ITM readers: This special guest posting proposes a great idea for a new blog (dreamed up by Asa Mittman and Shyama Rajendran). Here's what Asa writes:

ACADEMIC FAILBLOGThe conclusion to my dissertation is clever. It is sharp and
witty and pulls together many of the strands that run through the work, as a
whole. It is also simply wrong. I bungled the etymology, and conflated a few
Old English terms that I ought not have -- those macrons get me every time.
Luckily, I sorted all this out before it became my first book, Maps and Monsters. Since hardly anyone (thankfully) has read the dissertation version,
hardly anyone knows about my error, there. I benefited from having figured it
out, but nobody else has benefited from this error.

It was, though, not an unmitigated success. There were moments
of failure, of stumbling and faltering, of awkwardness and outright error. And
this is how it ought to be. If we are serious about embracing experimentation,
we must also be willing to accept that not all experiments succeed.

In his plenary on "How the Hippies Saved Physics,"
David Kaiser discussed Neils Bohr, who was famously wrong in his model of the
atom. While he was utterly mistaken about how atoms are composed, his errors
were generative, spurring a generation of physicists and their research.

In discussing this subject, Shyama Rajendran and I came to
wonder about the utility of being wrong. In the sciences, when an experiment
fails, the results are often published so that the scientific community can
benefit from the errors, can learn from the errors, be they algebraic or
conceptual. In the humanities, we are less often demonstrably
"wrong," since much of what we offer is interpretive rather than
factual. You might disagree with my reading of the Donestre in the Beowulf
Manuscript's Wonders of the East, but you would be hard-pressed to
conclusively invalidate it. Still, we falter and fail all the time. However,
many of us in the humanities are still in our 19th-century paradigm of the
lonely scholar, toiling in the solitude of a garret, perhaps with a glass of
absinthe at the elbow. And so our failures are solitary, which renders them of less use than they might otherwise be. When I head down a
wrong-headed path, I (hopefully) learn something. But you don't, unless I share
my failure with you.

Shyama and I therefore propose to create an Academic Failblog,
as it were, a place for any and all of us to post our scholarly missteps for
all and sundry to read and learn from. These might be related to research,
teaching, job searching or any other aspect of the academic world. We have
bandied about a few titles:

[Grandiloquent]: "Before the Phoenix Rises: Swimming in the
Ashes of the Humanities."

[Goofy]: "Faceplanting: Tripping Over the Scholarly
Cracks."

[Self-Abusing]: "Head, Meet Desk"

Ben Tilghman offers "Fumblr."

Mary Kate Hurley suggested "Scholarly Facepalms."

All are probably wrong, but perhaps one or more is productively
so.

Shyama and I offer this post to accomplish three things: First,
to see if there is interest in such a venture. Second, if so, to garner
suggestions for titles. Finally, assuming 1 and B go well, to get the
discussion rolling forward, so that when we have the site up and running, we
have a stable of eager participants. What say you? Care to stumble with us?

I personally have so many stumblings, I've lost count. Count me in as a wayward contributor. I've contacted Anna Klosowska, too, since the 3rd issue of postmedieval for 2013, that she is co-editing with Nicola Masciandaro, is titled "FAULT," and the contributor list is not yet finalized. She'll be in touch, too, with Asa and Shyama.

kg: you know what? Why not give Fumblr a patina of old fashioned philology and christen it in German as well? "Auch Fehler sind lehrreich" (as that Archivalia post is entitled) pretty much says it all!!

Thanks, everyone, for all your enthusiasm about this! My personal favorite currently is Eileen's mashup of titles- "Fumblr: Head, Meet Desk." Fumblr in general is made of win as a title. (Maybe we can put the stache on top of the F?)

Please count me in; I just gave a paper at a conference that got no response (well, two questions, but one was about the image on my handout). That paper is so faulty I think I need to contribute. Fumblr: Karl Fuck's Up is a great title!

I think Fumblr: Head Meet Desk is pretty great but there is also something about fucking upwards that seems appropriate too. Either way, I'll begin collecting my varied wrong turns and downright failures for all to see.

Hey all! Seems that FUMBLR is coming up as the favorite. I've heard this on this post, on Facebook, and in some emails. We've also had a great response from lots of interested folks, so we'll give it a go! Keep your e-eyes peeled over the next few days for an official launch, and start writing your posts, today!

Big thanks to the Material Collective -- it is out of the MC ethos that this idea grew, as well as to ITM for hosting this initial discussion, and of course to Shyama for collaborating on this. Lets fumble together.

Can't help but mention a quote I heard Paul Edward Dutton vouchsafe at Kalamazoo 2010 when someone asked him if a particular theory was verifiable or not and he admitted it wasn't really: "but, the best we can hope for is to be wrong in new ways". Get in touch and see if he will let it out as a maxim for you all :-)